Pentagon Is Testing An Unfamiliar Weapon -- Competitive Bidding

Well, we've finally found something that can unite the nation on the subject of the defense budget.

Nobody, hawk or dove, is too crazy about spending $400 for a screwdriver or $650 for a toilet seat.

Don't laugh. It's a start. At least these gaudy little embarrassments are forcing the Pentagon to take an overdue look at its lax management and procurement systems.

And there is some evidence that this look is spurring a new emphasis on competitive bidding and other standard business practices normally alien to the ways of the military.

As the Pentagon tells it, that new emphasis is nothing short of a fiscal revolution, promising us taxpayers 100 cents of bang for every buck in the defense budget.

The view in this corner is considerably more reserved.

As long as Congress refuses to move meaningfully to close redundant but politically useful domestic bases, and as long as the services themselves continue their extravagantly wasteful separate empire-building, the wise way to look at the fat in the defense budget will still be askance.

But even a naughty child deserves encouragement when he starts to do something right, so let's give the current Defense Department leadership credit for at least beginning to change its major-weapons

procurement policies to help the administration put a dent in the projected $227 billion national deficit.

The need is glaring.

While the screwdrivers and toilet seats understandably grab the headlines -- on the same principle that one baby's murder is more arresting than an account of a mass murder -- these are just tiny symptoms of a more fundamental problem. Most major weapons systems have not been competitive. They have been on a ''cost-plus'' basis (rough translation: the more the merrier) that added untold billions to defense contracts.

The Pentagon's incumbent bosses have recognized this. Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger says that about 30 percent of defense contracts are now competitive, and the trend is toward more competition.

The civilian heads of individual services are falling into line: Air Force Secretary Verne Orr notes that ''we need more competition'' among defense contractors to keep prices down and quality up.

Navy Secretary John F. Lehman Jr. observes, ''We've never had a case where the price did not come down dramatically as soon as the second source started producing.''

One example of the benefits of this new stress on competition: When the Air Force pitted Pratt & Whitney and General Electric to submit bids for jet- fighter engines, on which Pratt & Whitney had previously been the exclusive contractor, Orr reported that the result was better engines with longer life, and at estimated cost savings of between $2 billion and $3 billion over the life of the engines.

Another example: The Navy last month made a competitive award to Bath Iron Works, a longtime Maine naval shipbuilder, to design a new class of destroyers and build the first ship.

The Navy had put a ceiling of $1.1 billion on the ship. The Bath firm bid only $322 million -- and got the job.

The highest bid from the three competing shipyards was $413.5 million, and it doesn't require a high degree of cynicism to believe that, without such competitive bidding, the chosen shipyard would have come in a lot closer to that generous $1.1 billion ceiling.

But competition is still a sometime thing in the world of defense.

Take the continued Air Force stalling over Northrop Corporation's formal proposal to build 396 F-20 fighters over four years at a firm price of $15 million a fighter, with support costs also fixed for 20 years.

The F-20 is, by all accounts, a fine front-line fighter, built by the company with its own resources, that will operate with notably less maintenance than the Air Force's old, noncompetitive favorite, General Dynamics' F-16.

Yet the Air Force has requested funds to buy 792 more F-16's at a cost of $18 million to $20 million each, and has shown no interest in the sort of financial and aeronautic flyoff that might settle the procurement issue on a more rational and businesslike basis.

So any notion that the Pentagon has already been transformed into a super- efficient model of competition remains premature.

The enemy of wasteful, old-boy traditionalism has been identified, but the war has barely begun.